Confessions of a Recovering Slut (21 page)

“That’s nothing,” Giant Michael assures me. Then I tell him about the time years ago when I flashed my boobs at a bar in Key West, and he rolls his eyes like I could not possibly be more boring. He approves another T-shirt slogan. This one reads, “I’ll Hurt You if I Have To.”

Then I tell him about the time, back in my longhaired, silverring-on-every-finger stage when I, just for the fun of it, stole my friends boyfriend just as easily as plucking a feather from the air. All it took was two cocktails and about ten seconds of eye contact and I had him in my hand like lotion. My friend’s name was Mary, and I remember she had brown Dorothy Hamill hair and liked to wear boyish shirts with turned-up Oxford collars.

They were new in their relationship, and in the weeks since they’d met, Mary had been incandescent with a glee that I guess I couldn’t bear. She had come into the bar clinging to him like sea kelp, all aglow and proud with moon-shaped eyes looking up at him like he was a wonder to behold. I just remember her face that night, her smiling face, and how it fell like a Malibu mudslide when she realized what was happening.

I confess all this to Michael, and I look up at him like he should throw me out right then, because here I am a self-confessed idiot in his bar, but instead he puts his arm around me. “You’re not an idiot,” he comforts me, “you’re a goddam fool,” and kisses the top of my head.

F
OR YEARS I’D HEARD
that the entertainment at the Chamber could be kinky, consisting of public genital piercings performed to a techno beat and such. I mean, it’s a
fetish
club, for chrissakes, and until last Friday the closest thing to a fetish club I’d encountered was a fag bar in Prague complete with stalls with holes in the walls that guys could back their asses against in order to have anonymous sex with someone in the next room.

I was with Lary that time, too, as well as Daniel and Grant. It was early in the evening, the stalls were unoccupied, and since Grant was not gay yet it fell to Daniel to explain to us what the holes were for—that and why there were toilet-paper dispensers attached to the bar. Then the bartender kicked us out on account of my being female, and my friends also for having been tainted by such close proximity to my ovaries and all. Lary tried to convince him I was a pre-op transsexual, but the bartender wasn’t buying it and ushered us out before I could kill the vibe by waving Kotex around or something.

Anyway, I’d never been to the Chamber before, not even when I was young, so I figured I had no business going there now, all old like I’d been feeling lately. Michael had bought me lunch that day while Milly was safely tucked away with relatives, and since he owns the Vortex bars, to him lunch starts at 5:30
P.M.
and consists solely of mojitos and tortilla chips. Mojitos are those Cuban cocktails made with mint, sugar, lime, and rum. I’d fallen in love with them while attending a wedding in Miami last year. But there are bad bartenders down there just like anywhere, and sometimes I’d be handed some vile thing that tasted like a cup of fresh bile mixed with battery acid. I drank them anyway, and at one point I wandered into a gift store and came across a large book of photos, the sole subject of which was mummies.

All the mummies came from the same crypt in Italy, and it was impossible to pull my eyes away, even when I turned to the page of
child
mummies. They hung like dolls on a wall, all dressed in the Renaissance equivalent of their Sunday best, with ruffled collars and intricately croqueted jackets. It was heartbreaking, to think that so many mothers had to dress her dead children in these treasured vestments so their bodies could be hung for hundreds of years in a cold labyrinth.

My friends had to pull me away, and I finally found the perfect mojito when this little old Cuban lady bartender actually pulled out a
mortar and pestle
when I ordered. You know it’s gonna be a good mojito when the bartender uses tools favored by pharmacists and ancient apothecaries. So when Michael told me his bartender, Carla, makes a perfect mojito, I had to scoff, because I’d been graced by the little old Cuban lady. “Does Carla have a mortar and pestle?” I smirked.

“Of course,” Michael said.

Four mojitos later I was at the Chamber with Lary and Michael and their two hot girlfriends, waiting to catch burlesque performances. My friend Andy was there with his camera at the ready in case I started waving Kotex around so he could take a picture. He had been cracking me up all week with e-mails about the rat in his house. He’d never actually seen this rat, just the damage it wreaks, so he nicknamed the rat “Chupacabra,” after the mythical Mexican beast that mutilates livestock.

The rat made me think of the book of mummies again, because in it there was a picture of a mummified woman who must have died crouching in a corner, clutching her child. Also in her arms was the shriveled carcass of what looked like a rat, but turned out to be a small dog that just looked like a rat in its macerated condition. The mother-and-child mummy cluster sparked an ocean of questions inside me. How did they die? Were they poisoned? Were they killed quickly? Did they languish? Whatever the case, they must have crouched there—this woman and her child and her pet rat dog—crouched there for decades right where they died before being discovered. I keep seeing that picture in my mind, and the baby’s fists are balled up under its chin, reminding me of miniature rosebuds in a wedding bouquet.

So there I was at the Chamber, talking to Andy about his rat, surrounded by Lary and Michael and their two hot girlfriends Tatiana and Kristen, watching burlesque and wondering what had happened to the beings that made up the mummy cluster, what could have killed them so quickly or trapped them so unforgivably that the woman had nothing to do but clutch these treasured things and simply expire that way, crouching in a corner. There I was, flanked by my friends, and by the time we left I wasn’t feeling so old anymore.

I
N THE END
,
Lary did not die. Thank God. I do not need that guilt on my head, though his being dead would not have been my fault entirely. His being dead would have been
his
fault entirely, but I still would have felt fairly bad about it.

“What happened last night?” He asked me the next morning. “Why does the side of my head hurt?”

“You must have hit it when those three guys pulled you out of your car,” I suggested. “Or maybe it was when you fell under the sink.”

The falling was certainly a possibility, since he was already wobbling by the time he got to the Local, where we all were supposed to be guest bartenders that night to celebrate Grant’s last night working there.

I showed up only a little late, because to me, even though I was a “guest,” the evening had the ring of work about it, so I took my time getting there. Daniel, of course, was already elbow deep in dishwater by the time I walked through the door. He’s a great guest worker. I think I’ll tell him I’m having a “guest scullery maid” night at my house, featuring him. He’ll show up with his own mop and bucket, I’m telling you.

The occasion regaled Grant, the real bartender, who was working his last night at the Local before embarking on the full-time pursuit of his Sister Louisa vision, and he had the three of us show up to form a kind of celebratory farewell foursome. A treat to his regulars, he said, though in the end I believe I am the one who was treated. They all tipped the shit out of me.

“Too bad you were too drunk to get behind the bar,” I laughed at Lary as I counted my money, though immediately I realized Lary
was
behind the bar. He showed up at midnight and headed straight for the Jägermeister machine. That crap right there is enough to kill you if you ask me. It seriously looks like some poison I got into under our bathroom sink once when I was five. Brown sludge with stems and grit in it probably. Why it needs its own dispensing machine is a mystery to me; maybe it’s to better protect the person serving it. Lary had handed out a half dozen free shots of the stuff before Keiger, the one who owns the bar, stopped him and declared the Jägermeister machine officially broken, and Lary officially banned from behind the bar.

Ha! Don’t ever tell Lary to stay away from a broken thing. It’s like telling a kitten to stay away from an open can of tuna. Even drunk, Lary can fix anything—or build anything, for that matter, which might explain the scaffolding that mysteriously appeared in his kitchen last week. Lary claims he doesn’t even know how it got there, but I do. I bet there was something broken up there, and Lary was trying to reach it. He’ll probably invent time travel one day, because there are broken things all over history, and sooner or later Lary will figure out how to reach them. For example, if he was on the
Titanic
, he could have patched that hole with some indelible paste he made from nail polish and pancake batter or something, and he could have done it shit-ass drunk, too.

So I kind of felt bad for Keiger, because he obviously did not know this about Lary, and it took all of an eye blink before Lary was back on that machine churning out megashots of the stuff until finally he was, literally, under the sink.

“Make sure he does not drive himself home,” Keiger told me once Lary found his way back to a bar stool, but by that time I was nearly fogged myself with that night’s made-up drink special. It was called the Honky Bitch, and it contained every sugary liqueur to be found behind the counter, with heavy emphasis on Bailey’s, and maybe a shot of soda or something. By the end of the night, Keiger looked like somebody shot in the gut, reconciled to the fact that no matter how hard he clutched his wound it wasn’t about to stop the bleeding.

Still he tried to keep an eye on Lary, but Keiger only has so many eyes, and Lary is quick, even shit-ass drunk. I remember I was on the phone calling Tatiana, Lary’s friend who lives nearby, to come and pick him up when suddenly I heard Keiger holler, “Where the hell’s Lary?” We all looked around, even under the sink, but Lary was not there, he was
in his truck
, backing out of the goddam parking lot. “Pull his ass out of that truck,” Keiger directed, and three guys ran out and literally did just that. They left his truck right there, too, halfway backed out, and then they stuffed Lary’s freckled, Jäger-soaked hide into a taxi.

For that reason Lary is alive today, probably. So in a way I guess Keiger did stop the bleeding that night, even if it was just Lary’s useless, crusty reptilian blood. I have to commend Keiger for that, too, because if it were me, and if that were my bar, and Lary hijacked the Jäger machine like he did, I would have left Lary right there where he fell the first time—under the sink.

I
F YOU’RE GONNA GET ROBBED
,
it might as well be by the best, and you’d have to be the best to rob my sister Cheryl. The last time somebody tried to take her purse, for example, not only did the robber not get away with it, my sister chased him down and gave him a concussion just for trying.

But this new thief, he did not take her purse, he took her money belt out from under her clothes, which, believe me, she did not take off, not on a bus in front of a stranger, anyway, and especially not since she moved to Nicaragua and became completely schooled in self-protective travel.

“Oh, he was good. I mean, he was
the best in the world
,” Cheryl laughs.

She is always laughing, but even so, her spirits are remarkably high for someone who just lost all the money it took her seven months to save, plus credit cards. She’s visiting again from Nicaragua, and she spent her first two days here on the phone canceling everything and retelling the story to the credit-card operators (“This pickpocket was like a
laser surgeon
, I swear!”), and they listened.

It’s hard not to listen to Cheryl. She talks at a decibel reserved for fire alarms, and always with the excitement of someone who just won a Winnebago on
The
Price Is Right
. At first I worry people will begin to back away like you might do when you realize someone’s got a cog missing in their mental mechanism or whatever, and for the first few days of her visits I’m always ready to be her handler or something, to interject with a pert “She’s just so happy because she’s spent a long time deprived in Nicaragua.”

But Cheryl does not need a handler. People love her. We can’t even go to the grocery store without Cheryl inviting the cashier to come visit Granada to drink at the bar she owns there, or stay at the special
pensione
down the street from the bar, which she also owns with Bill. Bill is feuding with her hatefully now, but nonetheless he had given her most of the money the thief ended up taking. It was a spontaneous repayment for a long-since abandoned loan.

“Bill’s gambling again,” Cher sighs, and I nod but I don’t know how to take the news, because Bill is a really good gambler. It’s one of the things my mother and he had in common. After she died I found a homemade card-counting computer in her effects, one that fit into her shoe that she could work with her toes to produce a readout on a fake watch she wore around her wrist.

When I found that I immediately thought that my mother, who’d spent her adult life designing missiles for the government, had finally found something to do she didn’t hate, and I knew Bill had helped her get there somehow. If my mother had been alive when Bill moved to Central America, she probably would have followed him there, so Cheryl went instead.

I haven’t been to Nicaragua myself, but judging by Cheryl’s elation when she comes back, there is evidently very little there in terms of modern comfort. When Cheryl comes to Atlanta, she is always foaming at the mouth, practically, over things like warm water, for instance, or bread.

“Bread! Bring bread! They don’t have bread in Nicaragua!” she shouted gleefully at the waitress at Carroll Street Café her first night back. My sister’s eyes are freakishly green. They glow like two tiny nuclear reactions right there on her face. The waitress was really quick with the bread, and my sister tore into it like a wolf on an injured woodland creature.